Untitled - ELLEN PAPCIAK-ROSE

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Published in 2007 by David Krut Publishing
Project Manager and Editor
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
Designer
Ellen Papciak-Rose
Digital Imaging Consultant
John Hodgkiss
Copyright © 2007 the artist, authors and
David Krut Publishing
Softcover ISBN 978-0-9584975-4-1
Hardcover ISBN 978 09584975-6-5
Printed by Ultra Litho, Johannesburg
Distributed in South Africa by
David Krut Publishing cc.
140 Jan Smuts Avenue
Parkwood
2193 South Africa
t +27 (0)11 880 5648
f +27 (0)11 880 6368
Distributed in North America by
David Krut Projects
526 West 26th Street, #816
New York, NY
10001 USA
t +1 212 255 3094
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www.davidkrutpublishing.com
Front cover: Installation (detail) showing
projection and drawing from Preparing the Flute,
2005
Opening pages:
Costume detail from The Magic Flute
The Three Ladies (Angélique Noldus, Isabelle
Everarts de Velp, Klara Ek), The Magic Flute,
La Monnaie, Brussels, 2005
Untitled (Bird Catching) (detail), 2007
Indian ink on Misumi Kozo Thick White paper
90 x 90 cm
Untitled (Bird Catching) (detail), 2007
Indian ink on Misumi Kozo Thick White paper
90 x 90 cm
Above: Drawing for The Magic Flute, 2004
Charcoal, pastel and coloured pencil on paper
120 x 160 cm
Dedication page: William Kentridge during
construction of the set of The Magic Flute at La
Monnaie, Brussels, 2005
CONTENTS
Introduction
17
From the Centre Out
Interview
18
22
Sarastro’s Blackboard
41
Notes Towards an Opera
Drawing the Stage
42
66
The Opera
79
Drawing With Light
80
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
William Kentridge
Stéphane Roussel
Printmaking
127
I am the Bird Catcher
128
Black Box/Chambre Noire
155
Footnote on Darkness
156
Appendix
Synopsis: The Magic Flute
Casts
Chronology
Selected Bibliography
193
195
196
198
206
Kate McCrickard
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
Drawing for The Magic Flute, 2004
Charcoal, pastel and coloured pencil on paper
Diameter 117 cm
16
17
INTRODUCTION
18
FROM THE CENTRE OUT
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
19
At the heart of the story that this book sets out to tell is Mozart’s grand, mechanical figures, building mini theatres, moving ordinary objects
joyous, funny, much-loved comedy, The Magic Flute as interpreted by around on a table, setting up a camera and testing projections against
William Kentridge. But if the opera is the protagonist in this narrative, different backdrops. He seems to circle an idea, to circumscribe the
then its dark alter ego is the astonishing work called Black Box/Chambre slowly evolving themes of the work in the activities of drawing and
Noire, a bleak representation of the underside of the magnificent ideals building and printmaking. The work itself – the commission for which
brought to life – though not unambiguously ­– by The Magic Flute.
he is preparing – is like a stone caught in the centre of an ever-growing
In 1998, the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels snowball of ideas and images, some of which are altered and inverted
commissioned William Kentridge to direct The Magic Flute, Mozart’s along the way, most of which find their way into the final project in
last opera and one that has seen many interpretations since it was some permutation or another.
first performed in 1791. After the Brussels premiere in April 2005,
Prints made as early as 2000, like the large tondos in the series
the opera travelled to Lille, Caen, Naples, Tel Aviv, New York, back to “Atlas Procession” that Kentridge created with master printer Jack
Brussels, then on to Cape Town before ending in the director’s home Shirreff at 107 Workshop in Wiltshire, derive from experiments with
city (immortalised in his 1989 film, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City tondos in 1995 and 1996 but also provide a kind of template for the
after Paris).
circular drawings that end up as projections on a blackboard in the
As this ambitious production came to life, and indeed even opera and in Black Box. The maps and pages from books incorporated
after it had assumed flesh and faced audiences and critics on stages all into those and other prints – such as Spectrometre, Portage and Shadow
over the world, it trailed in its wake a host of works in different media: Procession (all 2000) and the “Atlas Confessions” prints done with
prints, drawings, films, projections and, finally, its dark progeny Black printer Mark Attwood of The Artists’ Press in 2002 – resurface in a
Box. So while we have placed The Magic Flute firmly at the centre of variety of ways in both productions, reflecting Kentridge’s ability to
this book, we have also set out to make sense of the other works that create dense layers of meaning on a flat surface or via a projection by
Kentridge produced while he was preparing the operatic commission literally placing one image on top of another. Several visits to New York
for the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, to understand how an opera like between 2001 and 2003 to undertake a residency at Columbia University
The Magic Flute could yield such varied offspring and, in particular, to (2002) and to work with master printer Randy Hemminghaus (who
fathom how the artist could begin with an eighteenth-century German had been invited by the publisher David Krut to work in Johannesburg
Singspiel and arrive at a work exploring the searing event that was the in 20022) yielded prints that would look back to the iconic images of
massacre of the Herero people in South West Africa at the beginning many of his films, but also contain within them the germs of ideas for
the opera.
of the twentieth century.
As the date for the premiere of the opera approached, the works
The title of a book published in 2006 best describes the way in
which Kentridge works around and towards a major production in film on paper became more obviously related to its themes and images. In
or theatre. All of his artistic energies are rallied together in a process particular, the prints of Learning the Flute incorporate Kentridge’s
that he describes as thinking aloud.1 Rather than read his way towards explorations in photography that yielded the dominant metaphor
a conceptualisation of a project like The Magic Flute, Kentridge sets for the opera. These works, two large prints made to fill a wall in the
to work drawing, making prints, tearing scraps of paper, constructing Michaelis Gallery at the University of Cape Town, represent in graphic
Drawing for The Magic Flute (detail), 2004
Charcoal and coloured pencil on paper
57 x 78 cm
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INTERVIEW
William Kentridge and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
Johannesburg, March 2007
23
BLV
In one of the many notes you have made
about The Magic Flute you make mention
of the Modernist conception of the stream
of consciousness, which is often attributed
to William Faulkner but in fact goes back to
William James and other proto-psychologists
of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Serendipitously – for our
discussion of an opera that has, as one of its
central characters, a bird catcher – James
likens consciousness to a bird’s life that is
made up of alternations between flight and
perching, between fluttering movement and
stillness, an alternation that is also expressed
in the rhythmic movements of language
itself. The attempt to separate the parts of
thought would be, James argues in a series of
delicate figures of speech, like trying to cut a
cross-section through thought or like trying
to catch a snowflake in the warm hand.1
To what extent do your projections in The
Magic Flute reflect a reification of thought?
And would you say that your conception of
thought is close to James’s idea of thought as
somewhat chaotic, leaping from one thing to
the next, stimulated by first one impulse and
then another?
WK
Thinking is much more the insects and small
midges flying through the air that the bird,
as consciousness – not the same as thought
– lights on and moves between, picking up
this one and suddenly noticing that one. So,
in other words, there are all sorts of chains
of association that are invisible to the eye,
or, like small fish in a stream, just below
the surface. It is not as if there is simply the
bird flying and that is thought. Thought may
follow one particular path, but there are all
the other paths not taken, and all the other
paths still being thought through, or not yet
thought of, that language can latch on to at
different stages as it goes. Which is why I have
not talked of a “stream of consciousness” that
is solitary but diffuse, but rather a “highway
of consciousness” where you have a channel
but many different lanes and different
things moving in different lanes, overtaking,
stopping, leaving the highway.
But to return to James, the bird is in
The Magic Flute because the libretto calls for
it. We have a bird catcher, and we have the
character of the Egyptian god, Horus the
falcon, the bird of reason.
In Papageno’s first aria, the presence
of the birds becomes an extension of drawing,
and – insofar as drawing is about thinking –
they are related to thinking. But they weren’t
done with any idea that they would represent
thought. The projections were very much
at the heart of the production, but as one
of the many ways of giving expression to
the argument of the opera rather than as a
manifestation or reification of thought. The
argument has to do with questions of light
and darkness and – within the strict trajectory
of the story – light triumphing over darkness.
The projections are not the triumph of one
over the other but their complete necessity
for each other. An image only makes sense
because of the shadows in it. Without shadows,
projections are meaningless. Without some
light, shadows are inconceivable. So insofar
as the polemic of the opera goes: it is about
a messy, mixed state of things, between
darkness and enlightenment. It has to do with
an overall feeling I have that wherever there
is the certainty of light, there is a big stick
behind it, and that maintaining a train of
certainty, of pure light, is only possible when
there is violence.
Opposite: William Kentridge, Johannesburg,
2007
Left: Drawing for The Magic Flute, 2004
Charcoal and coloured pencil on paper
80 x 120 cm
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41
SARASTRO’S BLACKBOARD
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NOTES TOWARDS AN OPERA
William Kentridge
These notes were written at the end of a year of making drawings and animations
for the production of The Magic Flute, but before we began rehearsals: a halfway
stage in the process.
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Left: Miniature
theatre model for
The Magic Flute,
installed in artist’s
studio, 2004
Right: Drawing for
The Magic Flute,
2004
Charcoal on paper
20 x 8 cm
44
Learning the Flute
Some months after I had undertaken to do this production of The Magic Flute, I was invited
to exhibit in a museum in a small town. The museum was in an old half-timbered house and Above: Drawing for The Magic Flute (detail), 2004
one of the rooms – a monks’ refectory – was filled with wood panelling and murals; not to be Charcoal and coloured pencil on paper
touched by the artist. I decided to do a projection in this room using a blackboard as a screen – 61 x 80 cm
apart from anything else, to work out if one could use a black surface rather than the usual white
Right: Learning the Flute, 2004
as a projection screen. I needed to start thinking about The Magic Flute and decided to use the Projections on blackboard, installed in artist’s
blackboard as a kind of sketch book for the production, to see if a visual language would emerge. studio
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154
155
BLACK BOX/CHAMBRE NOIRE
156
FOOTNOTE ON DARKNESS
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
The Enlightenment authors told us that the government that approximates perfection
will be constructed with moderation across limited space and time. Between Empire
and the reality of command, therefore, there was a contradiction in principle that
would inevitably spawn crises.
– Hardt and Negri1
157
Left: Drawing for
Black Box/Chambre
Noire (detail), 2005
Charcoal, coloured
crayon, pastel and
collage on paper
40 x 160 cm
Right: Black Box/
Chambre Noire,
2005
Miniature
mechanised
theatre, drawings,
projections and
kinetic sculptures
Installed in the
Johannesburg Art
Gallery, 2006
158
The mechanised miniature theatre of William Kentridge’s
Black Box/Chambre Noire,2 with its kinetic sculptures, drawings,
projections and haunting music, contains a fractured narrative that is
both prophetic and commemorative. The work reflects on a relatively
little-known event in the history of South West Africa (now Namibia),
and while the historical facts that are its premise cannot be separated
from its marvelous combination of cinema, theatre and puppetry that
unfolds in thirteen short acts,3 they must nevertheless be recounted so
that we have a point of entry into the work.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Herero people of
South West Africa (at the time a German colony) are put upon for
land and labour by the colonial government. For a time the Herero,
under the leadership of Samuel Maherero, agree to the dubious terms
Drawing for Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005
Charcoal and coloured pencil on paper
60.5 x 80.5 cm
offered them by the Germans under Governor Theodor von Leutwein,
but by 1904 they have suffered numerous humiliations at the hands
of the European settlers and begin an uprising. Maherero instructs
his soldiers to attack able-bodied German men but spare women,
children, Boers, English settlers and other non-Herero inhabitants of
the region. Though Leutwein manages to halt the immediate crisis for
the Germans, he is deemed too weak by the Kaiser and his advisors in
Berlin to prevent further rebellion. The Kaiser sends General Lothar
von Trotha to crush the revolt.
Von Trotha’s aim, however, is not to put an end to an uprising
but to exterminate the troublemakers. A decisive battle takes place in
the Waterberg in August 1904 at the end of which the Herero flee from
the Germans. Anticipating this, von Trotha has left only one escape
route, a gap in the German defence that leads into the Omaheke
Desert. Behind the fleeing Herero, von Trotha seals off the waterholes,
consigning thousands to death from thirst and starvation. The Nama
people, though not allies of the Herero, join the uprising. While
small bands of Nama warriors manage to lay siege to the Germans,
they are eventually defeated. Both Herero and Nama women and
children are sent to forced-labour camps where thousands perish. A
1911 census establishes that “only half the Nama estimated a decade
before (9,800 out of 20,000) and less than a quarter of the original
number of Herero (15,000 out of 80,000) were found to have survived
the war.”4 Von Trotha’s “Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order)”5
has produced the first genocide of the twentieth century.
This brutal chapter of history is the central theme of Black
Box, but the densely layered work extends beyond this particular
history to contemplate the connection between colonialism and the
Enlightenment values celebrated in The Magic Flute, the opera that
Kentridge was directing when he began work on Black Box. It draws
together Kentridge’s obsessions of the past several years – Mozart’s
eighteenth-century opera, the story of Germany’s presence in Africa,
South Africa’s own role in the history of Namibia – and in doing so
enacts a form of personal and collective self-analysis.
159
Drawing for Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005
Charcoal and coloured pencil on paper
80 x 120 cm
190
5 P
akenham, p. 612.
6 William Kentridge Prints, Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing,
and Iowa: Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, 2006, p. 150.
7 Drypoint is a method used in printmaking whereby marks are
applied directly to a copper plate with a sharp instrument. The
instrument, in gouging a path through the copper, throws up a burr
on either side of the line and it is this roughened edge that holds ink
and gives drypoint lines their characteristic fuzziness.
8 Lombroso published several books on his research, including L’Uomo
Delinquente (The Criminal Man) in 1876.
9 Houghton is a wealthy suburb of northern Johannesburg. Triomf (the
Afrikaans word for triumph) is the name of a working-class suburb in
the south of Johannesburg that was originally the black township of
Sophiatown. In the 1950s, the residents of Sophiatown were forcibly
removed from the area by the apartheid regime and resettled outside
of the city in areas bearing names like Meadowlands.
1 M
ichel Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA and
London, England: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 372.
2 Kentridge and others writing about this production use the longer title
Black Box/Chambre Noire and the shorter Black Box interchangeably.
For brevity, I use the shorter version.
3 The thirteen acts of Black Box are: Black Box Overture; Berlin Opening;
Measuring Part 1; Running Man; In diesen heil’gen Hallen; The
Waterberg; Fairground; De Wahrheit; Measuring Part 2; Rhino; Dance
Macabre; Lament from the March of the Priests; Elegy for a Rhino.
4 Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876–1912, London:
Abacus, 1992, p. 615. See also J. M. Bridgman, The Revolt of the
Hereros, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982.
191
10 S ee the article by Maria-Christina Villaseñor on the Deutsche
Guggenheim website for a list of texts used in Black Box: www.
deutsche-guggenheim-berlin.de/e/ausstellungen-kentridge01.
11 Estimates of the death toll vary between five million and thirty
million. See Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
12 See Andrew Wallis, Silent Accomplice: The Untold Story of France’s
Role in the Rwandan Genocide, London and New York: I.B. Tauris,
2007.
13 Black Box/Chambre Noire, exhibition catalogue, Berlin: Deutsche
Guggenheim, 2005, pp. 89–91.
14 See Stéphane Roussel’s essay in this book for a discussion of
photography in The Magic Flute.
15 “The Body and the Archive” in Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest
of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Massachusetts: The
MIT Press, 5th edition, 1996.
16 I bid, p. 345.
17 Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, Cambridge, MA and
London, England: The MIT Press, 1995, pp. xv–xvi.
18 This phrase, the title of a poem by Abel Meeropol, refers to the
victims of lynchings in the United States during slavery.
19 See Kate McCrickard’s essay in this book for a discussion of the
source of this film and the art-historical and cultural references to
rhinos implied in Kentridge’s use of this figure.
Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2005 showing workings
of the theatre and the mechanised objects within it
Installed in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2006
208
209
In the spring of 2007, William Kentridge’s production
of The Magic Flute opened in Johannesburg, South
Africa after an extended world tour. The performances
were the culmination of a remarkable creative process
that began with a commission from the Théâtre Royal
de la Monnaie in Brussels in 1998. As he prepared
The Magic Flute, Kentridge also began work on what
was to become a footnote and companion piece to
the opera, a brilliant but dark miniature mechanised
theatre production called Black Box/Chambre Noire.
A searing analysis of the massacre of the Herero
people in German South West Africa (now Namibia)
at the beginning of the twentieth century, Black Box
answers some of the troubling questions posed by
the Enlightenment values of The Magic Flute.
Through an interview, essays and Kentridge’s own
notes, as well as photographs and reproductions
of the many prints and drawings that he created
while he was working on The Magic Flute and Black
Box, William Kentridge Flute considers one of the
most productive periods in the career of a major
contemporary artist.
ISBN 978-0-9584975-6-5
9
780958 497565